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Interview with
Mr. Luis Marco,
General Manager of the Ritz Carlton Cancun
February the 18th, 2000
Website : www.ritzcarlton.com
| Could you give us a brief historical background of the Ritz Carlton Cancun?
The Ritz Carton Cancun opened its doors for the first time in April of 1993. Today it has the 365 rooms, with 15 suites and 2 penthouses, 2 specialty restaurants that have both been awarded with the 5 diamonds qualification by the AAA for three years in a row as well as the entire hotel, that has kept its 5 diamonds since 1994. The hotel has been also a recipient of the Mexican National Quality Award twice, once in 1994 and again in 1999. We were the only hotel to receive it and only institution to receive it twice. It has 600 people working in it, and it has been a very successful hotel since the day it started operating.
Your hotel has received so many awards. What has been your strategy to achieve that and what is your strategy to maintain your high standards?
The strategy is not unique for the Ritz Carlton Cancun but it is rather a corporate one. The first step is the selection of our people. It is a very sophisticated process in which we really look for the profiles that will fill out the positions and that puts them in the situation of being successful. The second step is the orientation process in which selected personnel will follow a two days orientation where they will be introduced to our philosophy of work, to our work ethics, they will be told who we are and why we work the way we work, after which they will know exactly what is expected from them and what they can expect from us. And the third step is the certification process where every employee in our company is certified in his area of work as knowing how to develop the tasks and the work that is expected from him or her in the Ritz Carlton way. These are basically the three steps that make the difference between our company and many others and between getting awards and not getting any. It is definitely our personnel and the work made here what makes the difference. All the instruments can be bought, but the difference lies on the way the orchestra plays.
Which hotels are your biggest competitors here in Cancun?
50% of our business is convention and meeting business. If I was a meeting planner and I was planning right now a convention in the Caribbean I would probably look at San Juan in Puerto Rico, Saint Thomas, Jamaica, and Cancun, which are real competitors today. Lets say that none of the others is suited to my needs and I decide to come to Cancun. Here I would probably visit and decide between the Fiesta Americana, the Hilton, the Marriott because of the name, and the Ritz Carlton . This would be the competitive set to which we would compare how we are doing, so we have competitors everywhere here in Cancun and abroad.
What impact will the free-trade agreement with Europe have on your hotel?
There is already a tremendous amount of European investors in what is now called the Riviera Maya. Every Spanish hotel chain that I know is already establishing there, as well as some German and French ones. So I do not see much impact in Cancun unless there is a certain diversification of investments touching not only the tourist sector but something else. We are looking here at a very rich country in terms of natural resources and opportunities that have not been developed. In the peninsula of Yucatan tourism seems to be "à la mode", but there are plenty of possibilities to be exploited in sectors as fishing, lumbering, and many others. European are limiting their investments to banking institution, hotels, communications, computers and software, leaving aside all the other great opportunities that Mexico offers.
What are your investment plans for the future?
The hotel is seven years old so we are going through a hole renovation program as far as the hotel itself is concerned. We started last year with all of our rooms, this year we will continue with our suites, the SPA areas and so on. We are kind of redoing the hotel, but in terms of expansion it is very difficult to grow being between two properties, besides I think the size of the hotel is the correct one to give our company and its owners the dividends they are expecting from their investment.
Do you have a quality control system within the hotel?
Certainly. The fact that we have won twice the Mexican Quality Award means that the hotel works through quality processes that were already put in place since the hotel opened its doors, so all the personnel working here was trained from the very beginning following our philosophy. We are qualified to solve our problems, and we do through a six step problem solving plan that is very much ingrained in the hotel.
All these awards are very important for your image. What is the strategy to promote this image within Mexico and abroad?
In Mexico the hotel has a great recognition already. Abroad evidently the recognition we get goes very much tied to the Ritz Carlton name, the hotel company that won the Malcolm Quality Award for the second time. In Europe as well we are getting known. Last year we opened the Ritz Carlton Berlin, we are about to open the Ritz Carlton Volksburg, we have an hotel in Barcelona managed by the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company the hotel Arts, Asia is pretty well covered with hotels in Osaka, Singapore, and Changai, in Australia we have two hotels, and so on. The strategy is to be present. In Mexico we have a three years and a half project of building a new hotel in Los Cabos, Baja California.
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We were told at the Cancun Hotel Association about their concern of more and more hotels settling down and that the offer might increase quicker than the demand. Is that a concern you share?
My concern is not that the amount of offer growing and growing, my concern is that the touristic projects are growing at a much faster pace than the residential units for the people that built them. I am saying that to build all these mega projects up and down the coast you need a real army of people working, and this people have nowhere to sleep, nowhere to eat, there are no schools, no hospitals, no infrastructure for them. So unless something is done very quickly this people will disappear. We need all that infrastructure for the people that has decided to stay here to live, to grow, to work, and to have a family. We have already a population of about 800 thousand people living here. Cancun is bigger than many European cities, and in five years time we will be over a million. Things are being done but not as quickly as needed, public investment is not as fore-coming as private investment. All considerations have to be done, for example every hotel room is calculated to give direct work to 16 peoples, and we have today around 24 thousand hotel rooms in Cancun, so we have 400 thousand people working only in the hotel sector, half of them are married, so we add 200 thousand people and they have an average of two kids, so we add 400 thousand more, at the end there are over a million people living directly from the hotel sector, and if we do not have the social infrastructure to support them, the population factor will be a serious problem in the future.
Where do you see Cancun in five years time?
Cancun itself will be the same as it is now, but in the Riviera Maya we will have to be very careful in the way we are planning to grow because one thing that really affects people and the Riviera Maya is the ecological system that we have there, the beauty of the Mayan areas goes hand in hand with a tremendous amount of natural resources that can be destroyed very easily. We have to make sure that people living and working here act as the custodians of this areas. I am optimistic, I feel people are getting more and more conscious about the preserving of our natural beauty, but we just have to keep an eye all the time.
Would you say that the Ritz Carlton Cancun is the best hotel in Mexico?
Yes, without a doubt. And I am not the only to say so, all the specialized magazines agree with my point of view.
At the same level who would you mention as the top three?
It is not easy to make comparisons because there are many categories. Some hotels handle mostly everything that has something to do with convention and meeting planning, some others are made for tourists only, some are small but still have an excellent service, and so on. But comparing apples with apples I would mention the Ventana del Paraiso in Los Cabos, the Four Seasons Hotel, the little boutique hotel La Casa Vieja in Mexico City which is wonderful and has only 35 rooms. Mexico has the advantage of having the Mexican people that are genuinely pleasant making everything much easier for us.
Can you tell us about your background and about your biggest achievement as General Manager of the Ritz Carlton Cancun?
I have been working for Ritz Carlton for 9 years already. My biggest achievement was being in Barcelona, my hometown, from the very early stages of the building of the Hotel Arts, a 400 rooms hotel, and being its manager for 4 years through the Olympic Games. Hoteliers always dream of one day going back home, but not everybody gets as lucky as I did, not just going back to Spain but exactly to Barcelona, which is the city where I was born, where I have my family, my parents, my wife, and where I participated in a project that was nominated best hotel in Europe. Everything is a different challenge. Here we decided to go for the National Quality Award, which was very difficult to get, so it was another achievement abovery important in my life.
Which is your final message for our readers?
Take good care of your employees and they will take good care of you.
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© World INvestment NEws, 2000.
This is the electronic edition of the special country report on Mexico published in Forbes Global.
July 3rd 2000 Issue.
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MEXICO
